III.

Typology of morphological level of English and

Native Languages

3.1. Theoretical basis of determining necessary constants in

morphological level

Key points for discussion:

 The object of Morphological Typology
 Correlation ofMorphological Typology with other branches of
СomparativeTypology
 Morpheme and allomorph.
 The notion of analytical and synthetic languages
 Typological classification of languages

Morphological typology studies the units of themorphological level. It deals with

two types of comparison:
 morphological or typological classification of languages;
 Parts of speech and their grammatical categories.
According to the morphological classification, the languages are classified
due to the typical structural features or means of expression of synthetic relations
between words.
Grammatical categories may be of 2 types:
 primary grammatical categories, which deal with parts of speech
 secondary grammatical categories, which deal with grammatical categories
within every part of speech separately: number, case, gender for nouns,
tense, voice, aspect, mood, person, degrees of comparison for adjectives and
so on.
Besides morphological typology studies morphological paradigm. It
classifies languages into languages:
 with highly developed morphology
 with less developed morphology
 with non-developed morphology
A morpheme is an association of a given meaning with a given sound
pattern. But unlike a word it is not autonomous. Morphemes occur in speech only
as for constituent parts of words, not independently, although a word may consist

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of a single morpheme. Nor are they divisible into smaller meaningful units. That is
why the morpheme may be defined as the minimum meaningful language unit.
The term morpheme is derived from Gr morphe ‘form’ + -eme. The Greek
suffix -erne has been adopted by linguists to denote the smallest significant or
distinctive unit. (Cf. phoneme, sememe.) The morpheme is the smallest meaningful
unit of form. A form in these cases is a recurring discrete unit of speech.
A form is said to be free if it may stand alone without changing its meaning;
if not, it is a bound form, so called because it is always bound to something else.
For example, if we compare the words sportive and elegant and their parts, we see
that sport, sportive, elegant may occur alone as utterances, whereas eleg-, -ive, -ant
are bound forms because they never occur alone.
Morphological typology
Morphological typology is a way of classifying the languages of the world
that groups languages according to their common morphological structures. First
developed by brothers Friedrich von Schlegel and August von Schlegel, the field
organizes languages on the basis of how those languages form words by combining
morphemes. Two primary categories exist to distinguish all languages: analytic
languages and synthetic languages, where each term refers to the opposite end of a
continuous scale including all the world's languages.
Analytic languages
Analytic languages show a low ratio of morphemes to words; in fact, the
correspondence is nearly one-to-one. Sentences in analytic languages are
composed of independent root morphemes. Grammatical relations between words
are expressed by separate words where they might otherwise be expressed by
affixes, which are present to a minimal degree in such languages. There is little to
no morphological change in words: they tend to be uninflected. Grammatical
categories are indicated by word order (for example, inversion of verb and subject
for interrogative sentences) or by bringing in additional words (for example, a
word for "some" or "many" instead of a plural inflection like English "-s").
Individual words carry a general meaning (root concept); nuances are expressed by
other words.
Finally, in analytic
languages,
context and syntax
are more
important
than

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morphology.
Analytic languages include some of the major East Asian languages, such as
Chinese, and Vietnamese. Additionally, English is moderately analytic (probably
one of the most analytic of Indo-European languages).
Synthetic languages
Synthetic languages form words by affixing a given number of dependent
morphemes to a root morpheme. The morphemes may be distinguishable from the
root, or they may not. They may be fused with it or among themselves (in that
multiple pieces of grammatical information may potentially be packed into one
morpheme). Word order is less important for these languages than it is for analytic
languages since individual words express the grammatical relations that would
otherwise be indicated by syntax. In addition, there tends to be a high degree of
concordance (agreement, or cross-reference between different parts of the
sentence). Therefore, morphology in synthetic languages is more important than
syntax. Most Indo-European languages are moderately synthetic.
There are two subtypes of synthesis, according to whether morphemes are
clearly differentiable or not. These subtypes are "agglutinative" and "fusional" (or
"inflectional" or "flectional" in older terminology).
Agglutinative languages
Agglutinative languages have words containing several morphemes that are
always clearly differentiable from one another in that each morpheme represents
only one grammatical meaning and the boundaries between those morphemes are
easily demarcated; that is, the bound morphemes are affixes, and they may be
individually identified. Agglutinative languages tend to have a high number of
morphemes per word, and their morphology is highly regular.
Agglutinative languages include Korean, Hungarian, Turkish, Japanese and
Luganda.

Fusional languages
Morphemes in fusional languages are not readily distinguishable from the
root or among themselves. Several grammatical bits of meaning may be fused into

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one affix. Morphemes may also be expressed by internal phonological changes in
the root (i.e. morphophonology), such as consonant gradation and vowel gradation,
or by suprasegmental features such as stress or tone, which are of course
inseparable from the root.
Most Indo-European languages are fusional to a varying degree. A
remarkably high degree of fusionality is also found in certain Sami languages such
as Skolt Sami.

Polysynthetic languages
In 1836, Wilhelm von Humboldt proposed a third category for classifying
languages, a category that he labeled "polysynthetic". (The term "polysynthesis"
was first used in linguistics by Peter Stephen DuPonceau who borrowed it from
chemistry.) These languages have a high morpheme-to-word ratio, a highly regular
morphology, and a tendency for verb forms to include morphemes that refer to
several arguments besides the subject ("polypersonalism"). Another feature of
polysynthetic languages is commonly expressed as "the ability to form words that
are equivalent to whole sentences in other languages". Of course, this is rather
useless as a defining feature, since it is tautological ("other languages" can only be
defined by opposition to polysynthetic ones and vice versa).

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 Many Amerindian languages are polysynthetic. Inuktitut is one example, for
instance, the word-phrase: "tavvakiqutiqarpiit" roughly translates to "Do you have
any tobacco for sale?".
Note that no clear division exists between synthetic languages and
polysynthetic languages; the place of one language largely depends on its relation
to other languages displaying similar characteristics on the same scale.

Morphological typology in reality

Each of the types above is idealizations; they do not exist in a pure state in
reality. Although they generally fit best into one category, "all" languages are
mixed types. English is synthetic, but it is more analytic than Spanish and much
more analytic than Latin. Chinese is the usual model of analytic languages, but it
does have some bound morphemes. Japanese is highly synthetic (agglutinative) in
its verbs, but clearly analytic in its nouns. For these reasons, the scale above is
continuous and relative, not absolute. It is difficult to classify a language as
absolutely analytic or synthetic, as a language could be described as more synthetic
than Chinese, but less synthetic than Korean.
Morphology is the identification, analysis, and description of the structure of
words (words as units in the lexicon are the subject matter of lexicology). While
words are generally accepted as being (with clitics) the smallest units of syntax, it
is clear that in most (if not all) languages, words can be related to other words by
rules. For example, English speakers recognize that the words dog, dogs, and
dogcatcher are closely related. English speakers recognize these relations from
their tacit knowledge of the rules of word formation in English. They infer
intuitively that dog is to dogs as cat is to cats; similarly, thedog is to dogcatcher as
thedish is to thedishwasher. The rules understood by the speaker reflect specific
patterns (or regularities) in the way words are formed from smaller units and how
those smaller units interact in speech. In this way, morphology is the branch of
linguistics that studies patterns of word formation within and across languages and
attempts to formulate rules that model the knowledge of the speakers of those
languages.
In linguistics, a morpheme is the smallest grammatical unit in a language. In
other words, it is the smallest meaningful unit of a language. A morpheme is not
identical to a word, and the principal difference between the two is that a
morpheme may or may not stand alone, whereas a word, by definition, is
freestanding. When it stands by itself, it is considered a root because it has a
meaning of its own (e.g. the morpheme cat) and when it depends on another

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morpheme to express an idea, it is an affix because it has a grammatical function
(e.g. the –s in cats to indicate that it is plural). Every word comprises one or more
morphemes.
General classification of the morpheme according to the role in the word is
similar in compared languages. They can be classified as free and bound
morphemes. While in Uzbek and Russian, they are called root and affixed
morphemes.
Free morphemes can function independently as words (e.g. town, dog) and
can appear with other lexemes (e.g. town hall, doghouse).
Bound morphemes appear only as parts of words, always in conjunction
with a root and sometimes with other bound morphemes. For example, un- appears
only accompanied by other morphemes to form a word. Most bound morphemes in
English are affixes, particularly prefixes and suffixes. Examples of suffixes are -
tion, -ation, -ible, -ing, etc. Bound morphemes that are not affixes are called
cranberry morphemes.
Bound morphemes in the compared languages can be compared as follows:

Bound morpheme
English Russian Uzbek
Derived Inflection Lexical
Inflectional Prefix Affixed
Suffix Affixoid
Postfix
Interfix

According to the function of morphemes, they are subdivided into lexeme

forming and form forming morphemes in Russian and Uzbek. The main function
of lexeme forming morpheme is to form new lexeme from existing one (бодр-
ость, бодр-о; ishchi-, ishla-, ishchan). Form forming morphemes serve for
forming forms of the same word without changing its lexical meaning (бодр-ый –
бодр-ая – бодр-ое; ishchilar, ishchini).
Allomorphy
In the exposition above, morphological rules are described as analogies
between word forms: thedog is to dogs as cat is to cats, and as thedish is to dishes.
In this case, the analogy applies both to the form of the words and to their

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meaning: in each pair, the first word means "one of X", while the second "two or
more of X” and the difference is always the plural form -s affixed to the second
word, signaling the key distinction between singular and plural entities.
One of the largest sources of complexity in morphology is that this one-to-
one correspondence between meaning and form scarcely applies to every case in
the language. In English, we have word form pairs like ox/oxen, goose/geese, and
sheep/sheep, where the difference between the singular and the plural is signaled in
a way that departs from the regular pattern, or is not signaled at all. Even cases
considered "regular", with the final -s, are not so simple; the -s in dogs is not
pronounced the same way as the -s in cats, and in a plural like dishes, an "extra"
vowel appears before the -s. These cases, where alternative forms of a “word”
effect the same distinction, are called allomorphy.

Comparison of morphological level of English and Native languages

For afull comparison of thetypological characteristic in thecategory of
thenumber, we have to find out in which place does this category take in the
system of another language.
If we take as an example Russian language, we can easily find its
characteristic features- in numerals, in adjectives, pronouns, verbs. Ex. Я беру, ты
берешь, вы берете, etc.
In a comparison with the Russianlanguage, the seme of thesingularity of
English language is presented just with zero morphemes, ex. town, play, etc.
However the seme of singularity in Russian language represented by morphemes: -
й, ex: сарай, край; -а, -я ex: река; -о,-е ex: окно. But plurality in both languages
can be represented with the seme of theplurality by adding endings –ы, -и, -а for
Russian and –s, -es for English.
In both languages, there are a lot of groups that are representatives of the
seme of plurality. Some of them are alike in both languages. Ex, ножницы-
scissors, брюки-trousers, весы-scales, очки-glasses
In general English plurality model can be divided into 3 variants:
N-N+(e)s ex: cup-cups, assistant-assistants, face-faces, photo-photos
N-N+en ex: ox-oxen, child-children
N-Npl (with the changes of vowels in roots) ex: man-men, foot-feet, mouse-
mice, etc.
In Uzbek suffix –lar may represent not only aplurality but other meanings as
well.
Ex: respect Hamid aka keldilarmi?

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 Approximate time Soat o‘nlarda kelish kerak.
Besides that, it can express the meanings such as superlative, collective,
irony and type.

Questions for self-control:

1. The morphological level is one of the main parts of language hierarchy. Prove it.
2. Can you explain the problem of typological classification in Linguistics?
3. What is the structural difference between analytical and synthetic languages?
4. Characterize 4 types of languages according to typologicall classification.
5. Compare English Russian and Uzbek morphemic structure
6. Is your native language analytical or synthetic? Prove it.

RecommendedLiteratures:

1. Аракин В.Д.Сравнительная типология английского и русского

языков. Ленинград, 1979.
2. Буранов Ж.Б. Сравнительная типология английского и тюркских
языков. М, 1983.
3. Рождественский Ю.В. Типология слова. М, 1969.
4. Sh. Rakhmatullaev. Hozirgiadabiy o‘zbek tili (darslik). Universitet. T,
2006.

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